​Europe sticking its head in the sand over environmental issues

Claudio Gallo is a journalist, currently working as a culture editor at La Stampa, one of the main newspapers in Italy. He was foreign desk editor and London correspondent. Occasionally he writes for AsiaTimes and Enduring America. His main interest is Middle East politics. He was on the streets during the disputed Iranian elections of 2009 and during the start of the so-called Egyptian Spring in 2011. He writing focuses on the Shiite world: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. He is banned from India because he supposedly wrote that the real country is very different from the officially publicized image. He likes to interview the last few thinkers who provide alternatives to prevailing ways of thinking.

On the contrary, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has promoted
International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde as a possible
president of the European Commission.

It’s a bankers’ Europe, forget the peoples. A continent without a
political identity, guided by a blind élite in the hands of the
global neoliberal system dominated by North America.

The most recent image of the European wreckage is a tanker, the
Aleksey Kosygin, that arrived at the Spanish port of Bilbao last
week. The ship was carrying the first major shipment of tar sand
oil from Canada: about 500,000 to 600,000 barrels.

The Kosygin is not just another tanker – it’s a bomb against the
European Union’s environmental policy that seems miserably
failing in the face of almighty commercial logic. The fairy tale
of Europe that protects the environment and the health of its
citizens crumbled in Bilbao, giving us a heads-up of what the
Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement will be if Europeans don’t
stop it. The Spanish environmentalists that were protesting at
the dock knew this quite well.

The European Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) labeled tar sand oil as
being more carbon-intensive than normal fossil fuels. The
European Commission published a scientific report, written by
Professor Adam Brandt of the Department of Energy Resources
Engineering at Stanford University. The report confirmed that
carbon emissions from tar sands were “significantly higher
than ...industry-average emissions from conventional fuels.”
The same Fuel Quality Directive, approved by member states in
2009, targets a 6 percent cut in greenhouse gas emission from
fuel use by 2020. However, tar sand oil has been classified by
the EU as 25 percent more pollutive than other forms of crude
oil. It is obvious that the use of tar sand oil and the 2020
objective are not compatible.

But now Europe appears to be dropping out of fuel regulation, and
kneeling in front of the hammering Canadian lobby that has been
arguing for many years that European studies on tar sand oil are
biased. Guess why precisely now? “The governments
are increasingly worried about their dependence on Russian energy
imports.”

Today Russia justifies everything, even Europe’s self-sacrifice,
but in 2011, Friends of the Earth Europe published a report
entitled, “Dirty Lobby Diary,” which documented in
detail the efforts by the Canadians to undermine the FQD. A
second report from Friends of the Earth Europe, titled
“Keeping their head in the sand” is even
more alarming.

It says that: “In January 2013, a new research by the NGO Oil
Change International signaled that the carbon emissions from the
tar sands were even greater than previously thought. This is
because 15 to 30 percent of a barrel of tar sands bitumen is
converted during the refining process into a coal-like solid fuel
called petroleum coke or petcoke, which is also burnt.”

Cajoling and threatening, Canada is now celebrating a big victory
over weak Europe. The most effective, half-expressed threat, was
to apply to the WTO, the supranational tribunal of globalized
capitalism. But David Plunkett, the Canadian Ambassador to the
EU, also used more traditional menaces. In a letter to the
European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard in July
2012, quoting the industry association, Europia, he warned that
EU refineries might become uneconomic, and that, if the FQD was
unilaterally adopted by the EU, heavy crude suppliers would
“shuffle” to other markets.

A day later, quoting the second FEE report: “Europia wrote
directly to Philip Owen at DG Climate Action reiterating this
threat. The FQD, he argued, ‘will create unnecessary
administrative complexity for all EU fuel suppliers and Member
States’ and was a real ‘threat to competitiveness of EU refining
versus international competitors.”

In the open market everything that becomes a commodity must be
sold, and its potentially harmful nature doesn’t matter: no one
has the power to object to the thing itself. The profit is the
only justification, as every financier and criminal knows.

The Spanish oil giant Repsol, which received the Kosygin
shipment, has been reportedly upgrading its refineries to process
tar sand oil. It’s only the beginning. Torbjorn Kjus, an oil
analyst at DBN Market, told to Oil Change International that
refiners “wouldn’t care what the source is” and
“wouldn’t think about the carbon content at all.”

The US-based green group the Natural Resource Defense Council
stated that the current European import of about 4,000 barrels of
tar sand oil per day could increase to more than 700,000 barrels
per day if planned pipelines in US and Canada are finally built.

After years of resistance Europe has surrendered to Canadian
pressures and FQD’s restrictive mechanism has been mothballed:
“The European Commission draft document seen by Reuters
proposes that oil refiners would only have to report an EU-wide
average of the emissions for the feedstock they use. “The
proposed methodology requires suppliers to report a (European)
Union average greenhouse gas emission intensity per fuel with an
option to report supplier specific values,” the draft says.

In typical Brussels style, a door to a more decent solution is
left open to an unlikely future: the draft proposes a review by
the end of 2016 to again address the case for introducing higher
values for individual fuel sources.

Brussels is not commenting, saying that that the draft is not yet
an official document, but the play’s direction seems quite clear.

Probably the Canadians are sneering with a flute of champagne in
their hands. Ottawa’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper told
reporters after G7 talks in Brussels on Thursday: "We don't
see the crisis in Ukraine as simply an opportunity to market
Canadian products, but obviously we're deeply engaged in a
discussion with our allies on how we can make sure that globally
our energy supplies are secure and stable," What a
benefactor, indeed. Europe should be grateful.

As the French philosopher Alain de Benoist puts it in a recent
interview: “Europe is a huge body that is sick, paralyzed and
stuck. It is unable to define its identity, as demonstrated by
its docile acceptance to melt in a large area of the Atlantic
where US standards relating to the environment, health and social
care will be imposed in trade. This Europe has been built from
the outset against common sense, from top to bottom, regardless
of the principle of subsidiarity, without limits, without an
association of nations to its construction. A Union promoting the
most destructive principles of liberalism. Unfortunately, Europe
is far from becoming a model of culture and civilization that is
able to play its role in a multipolar world.”

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.